Fostering care and peaceful multispecies coexistence with agential provotypes

Fostering care and peaceful multispecies coexistence with agential provotypes

Raune Frankjaer / Denmark
Aarhus University
Paper

Human societies are deeply entangled with biotic and abiotic entities that constitute and sustain our life-world, consequently to address peaceful coexistence within and between human societies, necessitates addressing a much broader issue: peaceful multispecies coexistence and the end of environmental violence. Key to this is a change of the present dominant neoliberalist ontology, which is wreaking havoc on the planet, socially and ecologically. This paper introduces agential provotyping as a catalyst to prompt a dialectic process of reflection of the assumptions and beliefs, which constitutes the foundation of our present exploitative and human-centered value system. Agential prototypes are tools of subversive design practice, which are readily accessible design artifacts aimed at a broad heterogeneous public that reveal the taken-for-granted elements of the human life-world through playful interaction and aesthetic experience. The paper starts by explaining the relationship with provotyping as emerging from systems design and positions agential provotypes in relation to critical design. It thereafter demonstrates agential prototyping on the basis of an interactive installation consisting of digital artifacts and plants; nally it discusses the impact of the agential prototype on interactants' beliefs and assumptions and their development of empathy towards other lifeforms in their environment.